Patience Wright

Patience Wright (1725-23 March 1786) was an American sculptor known for her wax figures. Wright used her busts to conceal messages that would be sent to the United States during the American Revolutionary War, being a spy in London.

Biography
Patience Wright was born in 1725 in Oyster Bay, New York to a family of Quakers, and the family moved to Bordentown, New Jersey when she was only four years old. She moved to Philadelphia at the age of 16 and married an older man in 1748, and she worked as a wax sculptor to feed her family after her husband's death in 1769. Wright moved to London, England in 1771 after a fire in New York destroyed her workshop, and her friend's brother Benjamin Franklin helped her in her move. She was patronized by King George III of Great Britain, and she sent messages to Franklin in Versailles or to the United States hidden in her wax figures. In 1777, she made a wax sculpture of King George in which she concealed information on King George's debts that accumulated during the American Revolutionary War, but men burst into her workshop as she was fooling around on the floor with a man under some blankets. They destroyed all of her figures, and they asked her where the bust was headed. She told them that it was headed to the "United States", not "America", and the British executed her partner despite her answering their question honestly. She told them that it did not matter what ship it was on, but one of the henchmen told the leader that a ship called the Margaretta had left Shell Haven for Brooklyn three days before. Wright was shot in the forehead, but the bullet only knocked her unconscious, hitting bone and not her brain. In 1780, she relocated to Paris after her pro-patriot views led to her losing favor at King George's court, but she returned to London in 1782 as the war's end neared. Wright decided to return to New Jersey in 1785, but she died while making preparations.